We explain other's behaviour in terms of dispositional causes, but our own in terms of situational causes – Actor/Observer effect (AOE).

FAE is due to perceptual salience - for the actor the situation is most prominent so they give situational explanations; for the observer, the actor is the most salient aspect of the perceptual field, so observers explain behaviour in terms of the actor.

FAE is a bias rather than an error

Importance

Demonstrates cultural differences (Western ‘individualistic’ cultures focus on the power of the individual, so see things in terms of individual success/failure rather than the situation; Indian Hindus do not (Miller, 1984)

An important factor that biases our explanation of why people behave as they do

Storms (1973) showed that change in perceptual perspective changed the reasons people gave for behaviour

Attribution theory

Theories that try to explain how we explain the behaviour of ourselves and others

Focus on causes of success and failure, and how we justify our performance to ourselves and others

Jones and Davis (1967) say we tend to use internal

factors to explain people's behaviour as these tell us about the person, not just the current situation, so are more useful for predicting future behaviour

Can be prone to errors caused by relying on people making attributions based on logic (which they often don't

Heider and Simmel (1944) - people assigning human qualities to an animation of two squares and a circle moving around a box

Importance

Attribution theories help to explain social cognition (how people think about people/society)

Schema

Cognitive structure containing everything we know about a particular object

In social psychology these are social objects containing shared knowledge

Fredric Bartlett (1932)

Bartlett used schemata to explain why people mis-remember things:

English people remembered details about a Native American folk tale in ways that made sense in their English culture

Knowledge in schemata is packaged as generalised objects that make sense as parts of the whole set of information

Different types of schema exist, such as role schema, person schema and event schema

Can be self-confirming - "we see what we expect to see". This can lead to distortion and incorrect judgment, e.g. the Guardian ad where the skinhead running at the old man to save him from falling bricks.